


Perfect Harmony

by scorchedtrees



Series: Rivetra music AU [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-31
Updated: 2014-08-31
Packaged: 2018-02-15 12:07:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2228436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorchedtrees/pseuds/scorchedtrees
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU: In which there are pianos, Tchaikovsky, and a flutist named Erwin Smith.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perfect Harmony

He’s shorter than she expected.

She doesn’t know what she imagined him to be like, really; perhaps graceful and elegant like his glissandos, or smooth and mild-mannered in the same way his fingers dance nimbly across the keys. She never thought he would be so short, though; he’s hardly taller than she is. When he performs on stage, he’s larger than life, his presence filling up the room; every note, every chord he plays resonates in every corner, permeating the concert hall with his soul and spirit expressed through music.

It’s still hard to believe the man she admires so much—the prodigy who performed at Carnegie Hall at the age of four, the person whose YouTube videos are always on her homepage—is going to be the pianist for her recital.

There are more accomplished pianists out there, but he’s always been her favorite. The way he plays, the emotions his music evokes, the subtle pictures he paints through his harmonies… she doesn’t just admire him; he’s her  _idol_ , and having the chance to play with him is a dream come true.

She shifts her violin case on her back, the straps digging into her shoulder blades, and holds out a hand. “Thank you so much for coming; it’s an honor to meet you. I’m Petra Ral.”

He takes her hand, his grip firm; his fingers curl around hers for a moment ( _talented fingers, truly piano fingers_ , she thinks). “Levi Stolze.”

.

.

.

It takes no more than a week to smash all of her preconceived notions about her piano accompanist.

She can count on one hand all the things she truly knew about him: he plays like a god, his music is divine, his fingers ripple like water over the keys.

She can’t count how many things she subconsciously assumed about him: his demeanor on stage, his straight posture, the emotional depth of his playing, his cool gray eyes, his neatly pressed collars all bespoke of a quiet, deep intelligence, of a well-educated man with an appreciation for the fine arts and culture. A man who must love to read and drink fine wine, a man who opens doors for ladies; a gentleman.

Stolze is terse. He is irritable and abrupt to the point of being rude. His gray eyes are hard like marbles and flat as a desert landscape (one with very few sand dunes but many prickly cacti).

The first day he listens to her play through her concerto, all three movements of it. When she finishes and puts her violin down, she doesn’t expect praise, but she does expect more than a quiet “tch.”

The second day he shows up chewing gum, and proceeds to chew gum the whole time they practice together. He doesn’t snap his gum or blow bubbles, but it’s such an unprofessional thing to do, Petra can’t help being bothered by it. She won’t say anything to him though; she doesn’t want to insult him.

He chews gum the third day too.

.

.

.

And the fourth.

.

.

.

And the fifth.

.

.

.

The sixth day his phone rings in the middle of their practice session. She’s just started a section with many double stop staccatos when rock music starts blaring. Petra’s startled but she refuses to let anything break her concentration—at least until the rhythmic piano chords stop, replaced by Stolze’s low voice.

"I’m in the middle of something, Hanji," he snaps into his phone. "What the fuck do you want?"

She shouldn’t be surprised that he swears, really; his previous behavior certainly didn’t do anything to refute the possibility. She’s still surprised.

"I’m practicing. Yes, with the girl you signed me up with," he says. "I’ll be— _no_ , Hanji, don’t do that. I don’t have time— _no,_  I said no. Don’t hang up yet—” He pulls the phone away from his ear and glares at it like it’s the source of all his problems. “Fuck,” he mutters, and shoves it back into his pocket.

Petra’s not sure what to make of his random expletives, but she does know this: all of the other professional pianists she’s played with have always turned their phones off or ignored them when they rehearsed together. It’s a common courtesy.

Though she hasn’t wanted to admit it to herself, didn’t want to ruin her perfect picture of him, Petra has to acknowledge that despite his deft fingers and beautiful playing, Levi Stolze is just another human being.

(Albeit one with obsessively clean fingernails.)

.

.

.

The seventh day seems to be going better: she’s breezing through one of her favorite parts to play, fingers flying, bow buzzing on the string, letting the life of the music carry her into the notes; she’s reaching the high point of the section when—

His hands stop moving. He draws them away from the piano and into the pockets of his jacket; he pulls out another piece of gum and pops it into his mouth. “Your rhythm is unsteady,” he says.

Petra grits her teeth. He’s not supposed to just  _stop_  like that, especially not when she was feeling the music so well. “The tempo is flexible; it changes with the feeling of the music.”

"Not your tempo," he says, flicking a piece of hair out of his eyes, and for a moment she gets distracted as her mind wanders off on a tangent, thinking he must gel his hair for concerts because it’s always falling into his eyes when he plays now. She forces her brain back to the present, just as he pulls a metronome from his jacket pocket.

"It’s your rhythm," he explains, his voice bored like one way or another he couldn’t care less. "You don’t give the thirty-second rests their full value sometimes and just rush into the next note. Thus what are supposed to sound like dotted rhythms sound more like triplets."

Petra gapes at him; she hasn’t heard anything like this from anyone in years. A little flicker of annoyance bubbles in the back of her mind; who does he think he is, her violin teacher? She holds a master’s degree in violin performance, for heaven’s sake; she doesn’t need him to criticize her rhythm.

"My rhythm is perfectly fine!"

He flicks the metronome on and adjusts the tempo marker to the one printed on the sheet music, his fingers swift and purposeful as usual. The metronome  _tick-tick-tick_ s the tempo at her, the electronic sound thumping in her brain and further disjointing her thoughts.

_Tick-tick-tick-tick_ —

He clicks his tongue in the precise rhythm printed on the music for two bars, then shuts the metronome off. When he speaks again, his voice is loud in the sudden silence of the room.

"You. Are. Rushing."

Petra has always prided herself on having a mild disposition; pretty much everyone who describes her will use the word “sweet” at some point. Most people don’t get to see her temper, but when it comes out, she has a hard time wrestling it back.

_No, slamming his face into the piano keys is_ not _a good idea_ , she has to repeat to herself three times before baring her teeth in a pained smile.

"Fine. Let’s do it again."

.

.

.

It’s unfair, truly it is, how talented he is. When she has many bars of rests in the middle of her concerto, she watches him play, and is reminded once again why he was her idol in the first place. (And maybe he isn’t anymore; she can’t bring herself to idolize someone she now knows and finds herself not-quite-liking-nor-disliking, but there’s no disputing the fact that when it comes to the piano, the man is nothing short of a prodigy.)

His fingers don’t just move the keys; the keys move for his fingers. They are really nothing more than extensions of his hands, eighty-eight extra black and white fingers he flicks with ease, opening pathways to the soul.

Petra remembers the first time she heard him play. She never liked the piano much before that; she took both piano and violin lessons as a little girl and ultimately preferred the violin. With the violin, she could express and control so much with just a slight shift of her fingers. The amount of pressure she put into the bow, how much vibrato she put into each note, how easy it was to change her intonation, all the different techniques she could use with just different flicks of the wrist—compared to playing the piano, which she thought of as merely pressing keys with set intonation.

Her opinion changed completely when she found a video with a few million hits on her YouTube homepage in her “Recommended for You” section. “FOUR-YEAR-OLD PRODIGY PLAYS PIANO AT CARNEGIE HALL” was its name. Curious, she clicked it.

It was an old video, grainy with bad sound quality, but even that couldn’t disguise the simple beauty of the boy’s playing. He was a serious-looking dark-haired little child, but the expression in his music was far beyond his years, more mature than anything she’d heard in a long time.

Petra can’t remember what he played anymore—one of Chopin’s Nocturnes, maybe, or one of his waltzes—but she remembers with clarity the feeling she got from his playing. It’s a feeling as familiar to her as that of her own playing, because she gets it every single time she hears him play. Every one of his dozens of videos, every one of his concerts she’s been to (just one), and now every time he sets his hands on the keys and plays the intro to her piece, watching her for cues.

In his videos and performances, he moves when he plays. He doesn’t look silly doing it, like some of the people who pretty much alternate between hunching over the keyboard and throwing their heads back like the Little Mermaid tossing her hair on the rock in the Disney movie. His movement is subtle, more a gentle nodding of his head than anything.

It must be for show, because when he plays for her, he doesn’t move his head at all. He stays still, his eyes occasionally wandering, his expression flat, but his fingers still fly across the keys with perfect ease, and he can still invoke that feeling of wonder within her with his playing.

And he does it while looking  _bored_.

_Really._  It’s so  _unfair_.

.

.

.

After the initial surprise of learning what his personality is truly like wears off, Petra begins to notice other things about him too. Things like how he always shows up exactly five minutes early to their rehearsals; and how serious he is about getting everything perfect, sometimes going through one measure with her over and over just to get one small thing  _exactly right_ ; and how soft his hair is (that was an accident; she was leaning over his shoulder to point something out and  _not_  smelling him—his rich, woodsy, slightly spicy scent—no, not at all, and he turned his head too quickly and her hand accidentally brushed his hair,  _accidentally_ , and yes, it was soft, as soft as her own, but  _whatever it was an accident_ ).

"Why do you chew gum so much?" she asks one day after they’ve finished and she’s wiping her violin with a cloth. He’s typing something on his phone and he looks up, blinking at her.

Maybe her sudden question surprised him into answering, because he says, “I quit smoking a few months ago.”

He used to be a smoker then. Petra’s not surprised, not anymore. “Why did you quit?”

"None of your business," he says, but the words are mild. "You should ask why I started smoking in the first place."

"Why  _did_  you start smoking in the first place?”

"I liked the smell."

It’s not funny, but Petra laughs anyway.

.

.

.

His manager, Ms. Hanji Zoe, is his complete opposite. She’s tall where Stolze is short, enthusiastic where he is reserved, and exudes good cheer and bubbly warmth where Stolze… does not, to put it lightly.

"It’s great to meet you, Petra—can I call you Petra?" she exclaims, pumping Petra’s arm up and down so hard Petra wouldn’t be surprised if it got pulled off. "You’re the first person in months and months I’ve convinced Levi to play for. I swear that grump would be a hermit if he could and stay in his room with his piano and his computer all day. He hates people. Don’t you, Levi?" Zoe slings an arm around the aforementioned pianist.

Petra expects him to shove Zoe off, to tell her to fuck off or shut up (she distinctly recalls “Hanji” being the person he was swearing at on the phone that day), but to her surprise, all he does is flick her on the nose and scowl. “I wonder why.”

"It’s great to meet you too, Ms. Zoe," Petra says, watching them with interest. Stolze’s hardly approachable, and any approaches attempted are usually warded off by his personality. It’s funny, seeing these two clashing personalities click.

"Please, call me Hanji," the brunette says. "Anyway, I was in the area and thought I’d drop by and hear you two play, if you don’t mind."

"Of course not!" Petra says as Stolze snaps, "No. Go away."

"That’s ‘yes’ in Levi-speak," Hanji explains, patting him on the head. "It’s cute. He responds ‘no’ to everything so you have to figure out what he really means sometimes." She ruffles his hair, causing a few strands to stick up in the air, and gives him a cheeky grin.

He tugs her ponytail in response and a strange feeling flickers in Petra’s chest for a brief moment. She ignores it and leads the way to their practice room instead, Hanji talking the whole time. She doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to try to identify it, because she thinks she knows what she’ll find, and that’s definitely something she does  _not_  want to think about.

.

.

.

They finish early one day, and Petra realizes she doesn’t want to go home just yet. She knows she’s lucky to have such a nice apartment for such a decent price in an overcrowded city like Manhattan, but it gets lonely sometimes, sitting around at home with only the Internet for company. She’s definitely not in the mood to have takeout for dinner again.

"What are you doing tonight?" she asks.

Stolze looks up from his phone—who he’s texting all the time, she has no idea (his mother? A friend? A girlfriend?). “You want to go over the piece  _again_?” That’s probably the closest to aghast his tone will ever get.

"No, no, I don’t." Petra tucks her hair behind her ears and wonders why she suddenly feels so self-conscious. "I was thinking we could go out and grab a bite to eat for dinner. My treat. I never did properly thank you for playing for me, so…"

He just stares at her, and she’s positive he’s going to refuse. She opens her mouth, about to tell him to forget it, but he beats her to it.

"No. Thank you."

She shouldn’t feel so disappointed, really she shouldn’t. “That’s okay—” she starts to say, but he cuts her off.

"I’ll pay."

.

.

.

The pub is a small, cozy place not too far from Times Square, easily outshadowed by the glitzier stores and restaurants surrounding it. It’s not too expensive though and has good food, so Petra finds herself visiting it at least once a month. She usually doesn’t bring anyone else with her though.

Stolze gets a few curious looks, a few stares of recognition as he walks between the tables. He’s not a world-famous musician like Perlman or Zukerman or anything, but he’s quite well known locally and it’s entirely feasible that people will recognize him. His face  _has_  graced the local newspapers many times before.

That’s one of the many things Petra loves about the city, though; New Yorkers don’t bother their celebrities. No one says anything to them except their server, who asks them what they’d like to drink.

"Just water, please," Petra says.

"I’ll have a glass of scotch." They sit in a corner booth; Stolze stretches his arms across the seat behind him, twisting them until his joints pop.

"Was rehearsal today really that bad?’ she teases.

"It was fine," he says with a careless shrug. "I’m going to meet someone later tonight though and I’ve found that it’s easier to deal with him when you’re buzzed already."

"Who are you meeting?"

She doesn’t really expect him to answer—he so rarely volunteers anything about his personal life; she was asking out of habit more than anything—so she’s surprised when he does, even more surprised when she hears the answer. “You might have heard of him. Erwin Smith.”

"No way!" Petra gasps, sitting up straight and plopping her elbows on the table, leaning forward. "As in  _the_  Erwin Smith? Super-famous-flutist Erwin Smith? Last-I-heard-he-was-playing-in-the-London-Phil Erwin Smith?”

"No, the garbage collector Erwin Smith," Stolze says dryly. "Yes,  _that_  Erwin Smith.”

"How’d you get to know him? Why are you meeting him tonight of all nights?"

Maybe it’s the relaxed atmosphere of the pub, the ambient music playing or the dim lighting, but Stolze seems more open to her questions than usual. He  _usually_  just ignores her. “He just got to the States last week and I’ve been texting him. We met the same way I met you, Miss Ral; I played accompaniment for him.”

There’s too much to process in that sentence that Petra falls silent for a moment. It shouldn’t mean anything to her, really it shouldn’t, but… in a way, he thinks of her on the same level as Erwin Smith, he thinks he  _met_  her, like they’re acquaintances or even friends in some way or might become friends one day like he’s friends with Erwin Smith, he doesn’t just think they’ve been forced together in a strictly business setting or something…

"Petra," she finally says.

"Hmm?"

"You can call me Petra," she says.

He plucks a menu card from the holder on the table and twirls it between his fingers ( _pianist fingers_ ,  _always has to be doing something with them_ ). “In that case, Petra,” he says, “you can call me Levi.”

"Levi," she repeats, and he nods.

_Levi,_  she thinks. It sounds right.

.

.

.

Levi Stolze, Petra has discovered, is a bit of a lightweight. He can probably hold his liquor better than Auruo Bossard though (who pretty much gets smashed after one drink. Petra remembers partying with the members of her string quartet when she was still in school; Erd could drink the most out of the four of them, which made sense, they liked to joke, because his last name was  _Gin_ ).

He’s barely touched his drink, but it’s already considerably loosened his tongue. He still seems clearheaded, his words perfectly articulated (with the way he speaks, all measured words and precise flicks of the tongue, he’d be a great woodwind player), but he’s speaking more to her than he has in the past few weeks.

"… And that’s why Erwin Smith is an overrated little shit," he finishes, leaning back in his chair.

They’ve been sitting in the booth for nearly an hour now; their dinner plates are cleared but neither are in a hurry to move. Petra hasn’t had anything alcoholic to drink but she feels like she did; her eyes are bright, her cheeks are flushed, and this is probably the most fun she’s had in ages.

She worried that he’d be late for his meeting with Erwin Smith, but that only launched him into a long tale about something the flutist had done a few years ago, something that she hadn’t quite understood, but the gist of it was that Levi had been kept waiting for over three hours. In the rain. In Amsterdam. Where he didn’t “speak a word of their damn language, the inconsiderate bastard.”

"Overrated little shit, huh?" Petra snorts. "Nanaba—she’s a friend and classmate; we were in the same class at school—would be disappointed. She’s a flutist too and she  _idolizes_  Smith.”

"I’ll introduce them," Levi says. "She’ll stop immediately."

That quiets Petra for a moment, because isn’t that exactly what happened to her? Stolze— _Levi_ —was someone she’d admired for so long, someone she’d put on a pedestal and thought was perfect. Then she met him and he turned out to be the exact opposite of everything she’d expected. But now she knows him, knows he’s just a human being like everyone else—and he may be rude sometimes, sarcastic, terse, and much shorter than she thought, but she  _likes_  him. She really does.

Levi Stolze isn’t the man she expected him to be at all, and she’s perfectly fine with that.

She takes a gulp of her water, suddenly feeling the room is too hot. She swirls the liquid around her cup and stares at it, watching the overhead lights sparkle and fracture off the glass.

"Why are you playing for me?" she blurts.

He stills, and inwardly, she winces. She didn’t mean to ask that question, not now, not when they were actually having a good time. But it’s something that’s been nagging her for weeks, and he’s been answering pretty much all her questions that night.

"… Because Hanji thinks I need more publicity," he finally says, shrugging, and Petra  _might_  believe him if it weren’t for the way he refuses to meet her eyes. “I haven’t been playing too many concerts recently and—”

"Bullshit," Petra declares.

"Excuse me?"

"You played at Carnegie when you were  _four_. I’ve always been a huge fan of your playing, you know, and I’ve followed you on YouTube for so long. You’re extremely talented but you don’t try that hard with your career.  _You played at Carnegie when you were four, Levi_. You know where you could  _be_  right now? You know where you could  _be_  if you busted your ass off working on your career? You’d probably be coming to the States with Erwin Smith, or having lunch at some fancy restaurant in Europe before you travel to the next stop on your sold-out world tour. But no. You’re here with me, a just-graduated music student—of Juilliard, yes, but  _just graduated_ all the same—in a small-name pub restaurant in Manhattan. Why? Don’t you  _want_  a successful career?”

Petra’s not sure where the words came from, but she’s sure they’re right. She isn’t drunk, not the slightest bit, but maybe the fact that Levi’s probably a little tipsy gave her the courage to say them.

Because they’re  _true_. He has a loyal following on YouTube and he’s quite well known locally, but beyond that, his only real claim to fame is that grainy video of a four-year-old him playing in one of the world’s most famous concert halls. And he deserves so much more than that; with his talent, he should be taking the world by storm. Maybe she’s biased, but Petra firmly believes he should be just as famous as Perlman or Zukerman, or Zimerman or Brendel (two of the few other classical contemporary pianists she likes).

Levi’s fiddling with the napkin dispenser now; she watches as his long fingers methodically shred the papers into little pieces: fold, pull, two squares, stack, pull, four squares, stack, pull, eight squares. He drops the makeshift confetti onto his plate and starts with a new napkin.

Just when Petra has resigned herself to an awkward rest of the night, he speaks. “I never wanted to be famous.”

That floors her; she doesn’t know a single person in the music industry who doesn’t want to make it big, become a popular soloist or at least sign a good contract with a good orchestra. “You don’t? Why?”

His fingers still, and he contemplates them for a long moment before answering. “I play piano for myself, not others.”

It’s a concise answer. Petra nearly drops the topic, but she can’t help pointing out, “You’re playing for me.”

"Hanji’s damn persuasive."

She merely waits. And waits. Levi reaches for the napkins again, then seems to think better of it and withdraws his fingers; he starts tapping them in his lap instead. Petra recognizes the opening bars of her concerto in his movements.

"Your piece," he finally says.

"What about it?"

He shrugs. “It was my mother’s favorite, Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto in D. She played violin too—not like you, but she dabbled in it; she was better at piano though—and I played it with her a lot. She’s the one who taught me piano. She wasn’t even professional, but she had a lot of feeling for it. I haven’t played that piece since she died.”

It’s like she’s seeing him all over again; every time she thinks she has him pinned down he wriggles away, leaving behind something new for her to discover. She knows how he feels though; her late mother taught her the violin, and every time she plays now in some way she feels connected to her mother. Her father has never understood her passion for music, but really, it’s a big jumble of so many things she doesn’t think anyone but she herself can understand it.

Anyone except maybe Levi.

He stares at her, eyes hard, and she knows he doesn’t want pity. All he did was tell her (partially under the influence, she supposes, but  _he still told her_ ) about his past, which is just that. The past. They live in the present.

So she only offers him her warmest smile and proceeds to call the server over for more drinks. Erwin Smith can wait.

.

.

.

He never speaks about it again, never mentions that night to her, but he remembers it with fresh clarity; she can tell in the way he starts watching her, the way he follows her lead in certain passages and guides the way in others. He has always followed along perfectly, rhythm impeccable, but now he really breathes life into the music, helping her soar and swoop with the melody and punch out the strong beats in the rhythmic passages.

He used to gaze passively at her for cues, but now his eyes are dark and intent and focused and Petra has to force herself not to look away, though her stomach flips and churns uncomfortably. The practice room all of a sudden feels too small, and with every session they have together, she finds it harder and harder to breathe. The air is charged, crackling with tension, and she takes all her uneasy feelings and wills them away, leaving only their power, which she pours into her playing.

They practice like this, dancing on tiptoe around each other, going through the piece over and over until Petra feels the exhaustion and satisfaction of a job well done creep into her bones. She thanks him for his time; he says it’s no problem; he holds open the door for her and she pretends her hand didn’t accidentally brush his on the way out.

The day of the recital draws closer.

.

.

.

It’s the night before, and Petra is absolutely terrified.

She’s being irrational and she knows it. They’ve gone over the whole thing countless times; she’s more than ready. Her dress is picked out, Nanaba (who is pretty much a fashion guru) will be doing her makeup, her father will be coming to watch; everything is set. She should just relax and calm her mind and get a good night’s sleep. It’s not like this is the first big performance she’s done or anything.

But no matter how many times she tells herself this, her heart refuses to stop thumping a mile a minute. She counts sheep, she tells herself lame jokes, she plays soothing music, she gets up and uses a facemask her father bought her on a business trip to South Korea a few months ago, but she can’t force herself to calm down.

Finally, at two in the morning, she flips open her cell phone and looks at the number she’s called the most in the last month: only to schedule rehearsal times, but now…

Feeling foolish, she presses the call button.

The phone rings three times, then clicks as the line connects. “Petra?” His voice is clipped and alert; he definitely hasn’t been sleeping. “Don’t tell me you want to practice  _now_.”

Petra laughs into the receiver. “No, of course not. I just… couldn’t sleep, I guess.”

"You’re ready," he says. "Stop worrying."

She doesn’t let her brain dwell on how well he knows her now after just one month. “I  _am_  ready,” she sighs. “I think my nerves are shot though. I can’t sleep.”

"I’m not going to be sleeping for a while. I can talk."

That’s just what Petra wanted to hear, though she won’t admit it. “Are you sure? You need sleep too.”

"Not as much as you," Levi says. "And I can survive just fine on half an hour of sleep and half a cup of the shittiest coffee in all five boroughs."

Since when did his foul mouth become more quirky and possibly endearing than annoying or crass? Petra shakes her head to dislodge the thought, blaming it on the late hour of night.

"Fine. Entertain me then."

He starts talking about something meaningless to her, an online RPG or something (she’s never been into those sorts of games), and she soon finds herself drifting off to the sound of his low, calm voice. Her last coherent thought is that he must like her at least a  _little_  bit if he’s willing to talk her to sleep… right?

.

.

.

She doesn’t know how long he talked until he realized she was asleep, but whether it was ten seconds or thirty minutes, she thinks his low, soothing voice did her good. Backstage, she tunes her violin to the concert hall’s piano and doesn’t even flip out when she realizes the piano is tuned to 442 Hz (she usually plays in 440).

Levi looks stunning in a dark blazer, tie, and neatly pressed dress pants. Her heart skips a beat when she sees him and she finally admits to herself that maybe, just maybe, she  _might_  have a tiny crush on him. Just a little.

She would tell him he looks like he didn’t sleep well, but there are perpetually dark circles under his eyes. “You look good,” is all she says instead.

He only nods; his eyes give her dress a brief onceover. “So do you,” he says. “Stop worrying. You’ll be fine.”

Petra smiles shakily at him but she feels the nerves tingling up her spine once again. Suddenly, he takes her hand and squeezes it once.

He does it awkwardly, like he’s unused to physical contact, but she knows he’s trying to give her support. His palm is cool and dry.

"Thanks," she says, and hopes he knows she’s thanking him for more than just that brief moment of reassurance.

He nods like he understands. (Maybe he does.)

.

.

.

She shouldn’t have worried.

Onstage, Petra forgets all her nerves, all her awkwardness, all her fears. She remembers why she loves the violin in the first place, why she decided to pursue it as her major, why she never wants to stop playing the instrument for more than a day as long as the world is still spinning on its axis.

She puts her whole heart into the music, bow singing against the string to the exquisite euphony of the piano. When her eyes aren’t closed or looking at the fingerboard, she stares at her piano accompanist, and he stares back. His fingers flow across the keys; he nods slightly as he plays; and when they cue each other his eyes are so intense she doesn’t think she can look away if she tried.

When she plays her cadenza, she knows the whole hall’s eyes are on her, but the only gaze she can feel is his. It burns through her back and into her skin, and she shuts her eyes to block out the image of those cool gray eyes on hers.

Thirty-something minutes pass by in the blink of an eye and before Petra knows it, she’s played the last chord of the entire concerto. It rings in the concert hall, echoes up and down the wood-paneled walls, until it is drowned out by thunderous applause.

Petra hardly hears it: she sees Hanji whistling in the first row; she sees her father shooting to his feet as he claps, beaming proudly; she thinks she sees a tall blond man who just might be Erwin Smith near the back; but when she bows and then gestures at Levi to bow too, all she sees is him and the quiet smile on his face (he  _never_  smiles).

.

.

.

Backstage, the moment her violin has been put down, she tackles Levi in a hug. “That was amazing!” she cries. “You did so well!  _I_  did so well! You helped me do so well! Thank you so much!” Before she can think about it, she leans forward and kisses him on the cheek.

Maybe he stiffens for just a second, but Petra doesn’t care, because he’s relaxed again, slowly bringing his arms up to pat her on the back. “ _You_  did so well,” he says. “That  _was_  pretty amazing.”

Petra nearly giggles; hearing a word like  _amazing_  come out of  _his_  mouth is pretty amazing to begin with. “That was  _awesome_ ,” she says, leaning back to look at his face properly, to judge his expression. “I wouldn’t mind playing with you more in the future.”

He hesitates for a fraction of a second—and then his arms encircle hers again. “Neither would I.”

.

.

.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for Rivetra Week 2013 (November) and just decided to post it now for something else on my AO3 account, I guess. The name Stolze comes from Kurt-Heinz Stolze, a German pianist, harpsichordist, and composer from the 1900s. He also orchestrated some Tchaikovsky piano pieces.


End file.
